Chris Hughes, a former Facebook executive, took to the New York Times to argue for breaking up his former company. Some of the arguments were good. Namely, that Facebook uses its near-monopolistic position in a way that is anti-competitive and hampers progress and user accountability. One of the most novel arguments was that Facebook employees themselves don’t even understand their company’s algorithms for displaying content to Facebook users. And he had some good observations about how regulators might be able to help on privacy issues.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Hughes also made some observations that were useful, but he couldn’t see the full import of them. For instance, he pointed out that Mark Zuckerberg desires more regulation from Washington, more guidance on what he should and shouldn’t allow. But of course this greater level of regulation would have the perverse effect of ensuring Facebook’s dominance; Zuckerberg’s company can afford the lawyers and the compliance costs that go with them. Further, it would shift the burden of governing speech on the platform away from him and toward Washington. He would continue to see his wealth grow, but responsibility for his product would be outsourced to the public.

But the most frustrating part of Hughes’s argument was that, at the beginning and end, his biggest concern for worry was not to see the 2016 election cycle repeated. This has been a major concern both in and outside Facebook, and historian Niall Ferguson was the first to sense how much pressure would come down on Silicon Valley not to be used by conservatives again.

Advertisement

Chris Hughes, Mark Zuckerberg, and so many others in Silicon Valley simply do not understand what they have built. In some ways it is hard to blame them. They were kids. And imagining the political impact of gargantuan social-media enterprises is difficult for adults. But adults with the right education could have given them some clues.

Traditional media such as books and an ecosystem of newspapers are an asset of highly developed institutions, with gatekeepers and embodied forms of judgment. They are also the vehicle by which one class of professionals tries to lead and form public opinion. Mass broadcast media, including radio and TV, were tools that lent themselves toward conformism, as dictators and advertising executives came to understand quickly. Social media, lacking these institutionalized judgments, was always bound to become a rallying point for those resisting the professional classes. The whole point was to build “Web 2.0” platforms in which users generated content for each other. And so social media in fact encourage opinions that run contrary to the mainstream to become socially visible faster. If you were being provocative, you might say that social media create a plane of popular visibility, allowing the previously blindfolded passengers in democracy to exchange grave looks and nods toward the “Let’s roll” attitude in a Flight 93 situation. In short, social media are a vast new territory for the practice of democratic deliberation, which is exactly why to proper liberals they look like a roiling and endless food fight.

Advertisement

Even as it is the vehicle that allows populist opinion to form more quickly, Facebook is not making people more conservative and nationalist. Instead it is allowing the professional class to see, notice, and quantify conservatives and nationalists having discussions and converging in their opinions at a faster rate. And so the anger and blame that is heaped on Facebook for “enabling” conservative and nationalist political victories consists of little else than anger and fear of the voters who happen to use Facebook.

Advertisement

It is impossible not to notice that the controversial privacy-harming techniques and big-data approach used by the Obama 2012 campaign was praised by opinion leaders. But when the same techniques were used on a much smaller scale for Brexit and Donald Trump, they were seen as sinister. And the latter was almost always bound to happen. The largest social-media companies are were always going to attract a proportionally older and therefore more conservative user base. To blame Facebook for “helping” conservatives is little different from blaming a window for revealing the roiling tide on the other side.

I predicted last year that the center-left governments across the West and the professional classes attached to them would not bother too much about the role of Silicon Valley companies in fomenting revolution, chaos, or even repression in the third world, so long as these companies promised to act as protectors against the practice of democracy by conservative and nationalist critics of the liberal political consensus. Because Hughes is no longer invested in the stock price of Facebook, he is free to argue for this protection effort even at the expense of Facebook’s future value. It helps him regain the status he lost in his ownership of The New Republic and the embarrassing political campaigns of his spouse.

Advertisement

But since I made the prediction that Silicon Valley would take the deals on offer — a promise to program users to become more woke, in exchange for a limitless profits license — my thinking has changed slightly. Social media’s value — the Internet’s commercial value — is intensely tied up in its ability to provide a space for critique and open resentment of our would-be mandarin class. The proposition — to act as an ideological enforcer and “opinion leader,” to turn social media into a weaponized and more insidious form of mass-media propaganda — will be a fatal bargain for these companies, and for their patron governments.

Recommended Articles

Most Popular

If the Democrats are really tempted by impeachment, bring it on. Since the day after the 2016 election they have been threatening this, placing their chips on the Russian-collusion fantasy and then on the phantasmagoric charade of obstruction of justice. The attorney general accurately gave the ingredients of the ...
Read More

One of the more remarkable developments of the last 50 years is the relentless commitment of a segment of the American academic and cultural elite to selling a vision of American life that is slowly but relentlessly proving to be — on balance — more harmful for children and less joyful for adults, while also ...
Read More

A few weeks ago, I noted that Louisiana’s state legislature is contemplating legislation that would bar makers of cauliflower rice from labeling their product “rice,” contending that consumers will get confused. Instead, the rice growers want the product to be labeled . . . “riced cauliflower.”
But ...
Read More

In 2012, Barack Obama was still president, indeed had four years left in his presidency. "Gangnam Style" was a world-beating music video. Game of Thrones had just gotten started. And, oh yeah, the climate scientist Michael Mann sued National Review over a blog post.
Seven years later, this case has gone pretty ...
Read More

Celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti was indicted by federal prosecutors Wednesday for stealing the identity of his former client, Stormy Daniels, in order to claim more than $300,000 she was owed for a tell-all book about her efforts to expose President Trump.
In the indictment, prosecutors for the Southern ...
Read More

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has continued his turn toward conspiracy theory with a new essay. Inspired by our “Against Socialism” issue, it's titled “The New Socialism Panic Is the Right’s Trick to Justify Supporting Trump.” The central thesis of Chait’s submission is that National Review ...
Read More

Every presidential primary ends with one winner and a lot of losers. Some might argue that one or two once-little-known candidates who overperform low expectations get to enjoy a form of moral victory. (Ben Carson and Rick Perry might be happy how the 2016 cycle ended, with both taking roles in Trump’s cabinet. ...
Read More

Affixing one’s glance to the rear-view mirror is usually as ill-advised as staring at one’s own reflection. Still, what a delight it was on Wednesday to see a fresh rendition of “Those Were the Days,” from All in the Family, a show I haven’t watched for nearly 40 years. This time it was Woody Harrelson ...
Read More

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was ...
Read More